It's a shame if this is used at teachings. Sure, Wall Street's fat cats helped the crash happen, but ultimately people over-leveraging themselves and not being able to pay up when they were hit by hard times is what caused the crash. When I'm placing blame, ultimately I place it exactly where it should be placed -- with the person who signed a loan s/he probably should never have asked for (perhaps without reading every single word of it, first) ... and then failing to pay on that loan.

A number of people blame deregulation and claim it was made to be too easy to get a loan. I disagree because no one twisted anyone's arm and made them get variable interest rate loans or buy stock on margin or flip houses, etc.

Ultimately it was the failure of many people, at once, to live up to their written and signatory promises on their loans that caused the crash. (Regardless of employment status, a promise is a promise.) It wasn't deregulation making it too easy. It wasn't 'rich people' as this video states. It was many someones failing to keep their promises to financial entities ... in a very short span.

When you make a promise ... you keep it. If you welch on it then it's your failure, not someone else's. Blaming 'rich people' is passing the buck ... just like living in a coastal region without taking precautions for freak storms -- and then blaming FEMA for not being fast enough to help you (when you could and should have prepped to help yourself) is passing the buck.

Surreal

P.S. I'm fed up with this country's recent (last ~30 years) trend of taking little or no personal responsibility and, instead, blaming 'other people' (including 'rich people') for things. And I, by the way, am part of the 99%... and I'm not defending 'rich people' or anyone else. Instead, I'm calling it like I see it -- too many people are passing the buck on too many things. The fact that your father would 'teach' this is appallnig to me, Enkei ... as he's teaching people that it's ok to blame others instead of teaching people to 'man up' and blame themselves if they are at fault.

First off I want to applaud @SurrealOne what he wrote is completely correct and it is the truth.

Second off if you truly believe that video and those teaching I am sorry to hear that and you are an idiot.

Did you know that the "evil" 1% fund 88% of charities in the USA!

Did you know that if the 1% gave all their money to the government, that would only last the government for only 4 months.

Did you know that most (80+%) "evil" 1% are first generation "evil" rich people.

That means those "evil" people worked their a$$ off and made smart decisions in their life and work to EARN that money. They were not given that money from Mom & Dad. Now the lazy people thinks it isn't fair as they sit on their butt eating fast food watching there 55" flat screen tv collecting welfare.

The poor slob who had a good paying job building cars for GM, who decided it was time for the family to buy a house, a few years into the mortgage, GM ships the good paying jobs to Mexico and China and lays off 10,000 people.

Maybe it's the poor slob working in a small town's local clothing store, had a good job, paid ok; and, in the name of progress, along comes Wal-mart, or Costco. Soon, the small store has no customers, the poor slob gets a job at the big store, the big store pays a lot less than the old store and only offers 3 days per week,

Maybe it's the banks who loaned money to people who did not meet the lending rules, then sold the loan to other banks, who in turn resold the loan, each time, the lending company made a profit. The mortgagor couldn't realistically pay the loan in the first place and the property is foreclosed.

Maybe it is the governments (all three levels) who waste money.

But, the biggest reason the US and Canada and ALL of the other previously wealthy countries are having economic problems, is the lack of jobs.

Where are all of these jobs, in the countries that were previously poor.

Who moved all of these jobs? I doubt it was the people, it was the 1 percent.

Who moved all of these jobs? I doubt it was the people, it was the 1 percent.

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Ray,
Loss of work does not excuse one from one's promise of payment on a loan. Thus, if lots of people fail to pay their loans due to job loss, the fault still (very technically) lies with the borrower, not the employer or the people who shifted job locations.

It's absolutely no secret that people have been living the leveraged life for a while and that people in this country want things 'now', not later. Look at the 80's. Look at the excess. Look at the trend to buy on credit instead of saving for things.

I have old school values, save for things, and live within my means. With exception of a mortgage (when I carry one), I am debt-free (long ago) by my own hand and I stay that way. I watched people around me leverage themselves and have the fancy cars, the big houses, etc when I lived in a condo that was well within my means and continued to drive a car I'd owned for 10+ years. When I lost my job I ate into my savings and took not a penny from the unemployment fund. My mortgage was paid out of savings. My bills were paid out of savings. I kept my home and got another job -- and I was out of work for a year.

And the people I knew living the leveraged life? I watched them suck as much unemployment cash as they could out of the system while claiming it made no sense to get a minum wage job because unemployment yielded more per month for less work than such a job would. I watched their fancy cars get sold off or repo'd. I watched their homes go into foreclosure and them squat in property the bank was repossessing until they were forcibly evicted. I also watched the federal government take my (and your) tax dollars and assist those people for a while ... rather than rewarding me (and others like me) for avoiding their predicament.

It is messed up when our government monetarily rewards failure in the form of corporate bailouts and mortgage assistance ... instead of rewarding success or simply conserving that cash. It is even more messed up when people try to blame the wrong people for broken promises. Let's place the blame where it belongs -- the people who failed to pay on their promissory notes are ultimately the ones who brought down the housing market. Not anyone else...

Ray,
Loss of work does not excuse one from one's promise of payment on a loan. Thus, if lots of people fail to pay their loans due to job loss, the fault still (very technically) lies with the borrower, not the employer or the people who shifted job locations.

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Surreal, I agree in principle, if you borrow, you must be responsible to pay it back; but when there is no job, there is no prospect for a new job, when there is no family members to borrow from, when you have kids that need to be fed and kept warm, what choice do these unfortunate people have? They could sell the car, but there is probably a loan that needs to be paid to clear the title, you can only cut back so far and at some point, the mortgage payments are the only thing that can be cut.

I am sure 75%, or higher, did not want to take that step, but take it they must.

The problem became, that the house no longer had the same value as it had when the paper was drawn (it no longer had the value, because in lean times all assets get devalued), so the bank foreclosed on a property that was worth less than the outstanding balance.

In good times, when a bank forecloses, the value of the property is higher than the mortgage balance, the bank gets paid and the cost to foreclose is covered by the sale. The bank is happy, and the mortgagor is off the hook, the economy does not suffer.

Most people will pay their debts if they have the money to pay. Of course, they will always be people who won't pay, but the banks should have exercised good judgement (not profit judgement) and denied these loans in the first place.

I am pretty much with surreal on this. Before you accept the loans and mortgages, you are aware of what the monthly payment is going to be. Either you can pay it or you can't. If you can't then you have no business accepting it. It isn't the lenders fault.

Americans have become a society of instant gratification. We want what we want and we want it now. If we can't afford to have it... No problem... We can just get a loan for it. Americans are financed to death without regard as to whether or not we can afford to pay for it.

When I was growing up, my parents financed their cars and their house... Nothing else. They saved for anything else they wanted. They put money into the bank and saved.

How many people today have ANYTHING saved for retirement? Who is REALLY at fault?

Surreal, I agree in principle, if you borrow, you must be responsible to pay it back; but when there is no job, there is no prospect for a new job, when there is no family members to borrow from, when you have kids that need to be fed and kept warm, what choice do these unfortunate people have?

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@RayVoy,
For the purpose of this discussion, the choices those folks had is beside the point. The cartoon lays blame ... and it lays it in the wrong place because, again, failure to pay on a promissory note is not the lender's fault, not the rich's fault, not the public's fault, not the employer's fault, not the market's fault, and not anyone else's fault. The fault lies SQUARELY on the shoulders of the borrower who is in default.

The backstory behind said default has nothing to do with where the blame for the failure to pay is to be placed. I'd expect a CPA such as Enkei's father to realize this. But many Americans, as of late, want the easy way for everything ... and it's so much easier to blame someone else, isn't it???